The media and public are apparently getting more and more worried about marine mammals and birds fouled or killed by oil spilled from the May 19 pipeline break. At least part of this current worry can be traced to pictures that began showing up on Facebook late last week of heavily oiled dolphins (or at least… Read more »
We have been getting lots of inquires about this crazy tarballing going on across Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles Counties. I thought I would give a quick overview of tar balls in our part of the world; the Southern California Bight. Oil Seeps In Our History Oil has been deep underground for millions of… Read more »
There are many critters particularly at risk with this oil spill. While our historic worry/focus has been on our rocky intertidal communities and on warm fuzzies (such as these cute marine mammals and endangered sand-nesting birds), other critters are at risk too. In particular the animals dwelling in the swash zone of our sandy beaches. What I… Read more »
We are seeing tar ball strand lines as the high tide retreats this morning. Intermixed in these tar lines are dead sand crabs/carapaces. Tar balls not evident near Hueneme Pier but many consistent, wispy tar lines starting at Oxnard Shores / west of Channel Islands Harbor. More details as we observe during today’s monitoring…. Read more »
Holy cow! It has been a crazy day. One of our teams sampling Haskell’s Beach (near the Bacara Resort) north Coal Oil Point was basically given the boot. Various clean-up teams are now sweeping the beaches from El Capitan to Goleta and the Incident Command has now shut down public access to all of those beaches. This… Read more »
Here is a quick tour of our PIRatE Lab’s lab. We have been getting several requests about our lab and decided to give you a sense of our set-up. We’ve also had lots of questions about oil; what it looks like, what it smells like, and how sticky it is. We have posted our… Read more »
We are preparing to deploy our ROVs and sensors into the oil spill site, and to examine the sea floor for any deposited oil, or affected sea life. We are awaiting approval from the Unified Command. Whenever there is a large scale disaster, whether it is a large fire, earthquake, oil spill or something else, […]
Our laboratory has been working very hard the past week and a half, we focused mainly on the environmental surveys that our laboratory performs. specifically in sandy beach ecology and environmental toxicology. We have sent out teams of faculty and researchers to characterize the sandy beaches that surround the site of Refugio State beach, the […]
Monitoring the Oil As the clean-up progresses, so does our monitoring. We now have sampled an array of sites that span the region of potential impact (Gaviota to downtown Santa Barbara) and the range of observed intensity of oiling. We are now beginning to shift gears a bit to have some of our crew focus… Read more »
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